


The Lesson

by bea_bickerknife



Category: A Series of Unfortunate Events (TV), Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket
Genre: Dirty Talk, F/F, F/M, Fellatio Interruptus, Gals Being More Than Pals, Multi, Multiple Partners, Non-Graphic Violence, OT3, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Possibly the very first written instance of a man being cock-blocked by borscht, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-25
Updated: 2017-04-03
Packaged: 2018-10-10 09:31:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 22
Words: 16,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10434750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bea_bickerknife/pseuds/bea_bickerknife
Summary: In which one villain messes up, two more mess with him, and all three mess around.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> As ever, I own none of the characters in this work, nor do I derive any remuneration from its posting.

She _said_ she’d locked the door. 

In fact, Olaf would have sworn that he’d heard the quiet metallic _snick_ of the caravan’s rickety lock, but in retrospect he realized that he could have conflated that with the equally quiet and equally metallic _zzzzzzh_ of his trouser zipper. He wasn’t the sort of man who paid attention to background noises when he had his dick in a fortune-teller’s mouth. 

Lulu wasn’t his type. He had reminded his troupe of this on multiple occasions, finding perverse satisfaction in watching her face fall when he did so within earshot. She was too soft, too servile, too…well, too _ladylike_ , somehow. Even in the midst of this godforsaken carnival, surrounded by dust and rust and animal dung, she retained an air of gentility. Maybe it was the lilt of her accent that encouraged her visitors speak a little less coarsely. Perhaps the fluidity of her movements subtly induced better posture in the guests who seated themselves around her table. Hell, maybe it was just that endearingly broken English enunciated by soft, full lips, but whatever it was, there was something about Lulu that seemed pure. Something that spoke of goodness and positive influence.

So, no. Definitely not Olaf’s type.

But when she caught his hand after the morning’s crystal-gazing session, pulling him closer with more force than he would have expected and asking in a honeyed purr if she could “read Olaf’s palm again, please” as her sleepy green eyes settled somewhere decidedly south of his palm, he realized she might not need to be.

“After all, please,” she added slyly, noting the stirring below his ratty leather belt and dropping to her knees on the gritty floor, “it is job of Madame Lulu to give people what they want.”

At that, he had leaned back against the door with a chuckle more predatory than the lions Esmé was undoubtedly tormenting with her new bullwhip. “You know,” he murmured, “that’s the first time I’ve ever had any appreciation whatsoever for your motto. Why, I think I’m starting to —“

The first languid stroke of Lulu’s tongue cut him off mid-statement, not that he was the sort of man who cared in the slightest about ending a sentence with a preposition and a moan rather than a more appropriate grammatical utterance. After a few moments of her ministrations, however, Olaf realized that her gentle sweetness extended to the bedroom. Growling in frustration, he shimmied his hand under the silky fabric of her turban until he could grab a satisfactory fistful of hair.

“If you’re really that interested in giving people what they want, Lulu,” he rasped, “then I’d suggest you aim for a _deeper_ understanding of the male anatomy.” Without another word, he thrust himself to the hilt into the wet heat of her mouth. When she choked and made to pull back to find a more comfortable position, his bony fingers tightened, vicelike, and ragged nails dug into her scalp.

“Oh, I don’t _think_ so. Your object in this exercise is to give me what I want, isn’t it?” Lulu managed a nod in response. “Mm, I thought so. Well, what _I_ want is to fuck your sweet little face while _you_ suck me like a whore, rather than a Labrador.” At this, something like defiance flashed across the fortune-teller’s face, but before Olaf had time to worry that she might stop entirely, it became clear that she had taken his insult as a challenge. Wrapping her pillowy lips firmly around his thick member, Lulu met his eyes through the dark fringe of her lashes and began pointedly to swallow him down into her throat.

“Ohhhhh, _yes_ , that’s _much_ better. I think I’m starting to see why you call yourself a Mada–“

But for the second time that morning, Olaf failed to finish his sentence. In this case, however, its abrupt end was heralded not by a preposition and a moan, but by a thud, a clatter, and a shriek. The thud came from a high-heeled boot making contact with the flimsy caravan door, knocking it inward. The clatter was the sound of two surprised adult bodies hitting the floor and sending assorted decorative trinkets tumbling to the ground.

And the shriek was Esmé Squalor.


	2. Chapter 2

There are certain sights in this world that are strangely beautiful and unutterably terrifying in equal measure. A shipwreck in the dead of night, with the shimmering reflection of the vessel's remaining lights shivering timorously in the black water before being extinguished, bit by bit, as the hull sinks into silent and anonymous oblivion, is one of those sights. The bloom of a mushroom cloud, all smoke and flame and shockwave, is another.

The knife-thin figure of Esmé Gigi Geniveve Squalor, the City’s sixth-most important financial advisor, is yet another. As Olaf lay on the floor, partly on and partly off the frayed Persian rug under the table, hair flattened in the back from where his head had pressed against the door and prick still jutting absurdly from his fly, it occurred to him that his glamorous girlfriend might have more in common with a midnight shipwreck and a mushroom cloud than just her ability to induce awe and horror in equal measure. She, too, could be deadly.

He gulped as his eyes moved inexorably upward and noted that, as usual, Esmé was dressed to the nines and armed to the teeth. The final few inches of her new bullwhip coiled beside her like an adder. The leather of her knee-high boots was burnished to a dull glow over her calves, giving way to creamy jodhpurs that stretched like a second skin over the improbable length of her legs. A gleaming burgundy belt seemed to highlight her angular hips – burgundy was very _in_ at the moment, she had read – where it peeked out from under the expertly-tailored black blazer that nipped in at her waspish waist. Her flawless ivory face picked up the white ruffles of the blouse beneath and appeared to glow, but it was not the gentle glow of a candle or the welcoming glow of a hearth in winter. It seemed to Olaf that it was the glow of a house fire, reflected on broken glass.

She was still. Only her fathomless eyes, dark enough to render comparison to even the bitterest chocolate impossible, moved as she took in the scene spread out for her: Olaf, even less august than usual in his current state of dishabille, his recumbent pose better suited to a chaise longue than to a scuffed caravan floor. Madame Lulu, lips swollen and a smear of suspicious fluid near her mouth, her turban askew to reveal hair that someone more charitable might have called flaxen, but which Esmé referred to as dishwater (and household chores were perpetually _out_ ). Scattered over and around the pair of them, like pepper from a very unusual shaker, were the sorts of shabby knick-knacks that very lonely people somehow seem to accumulate: several small porcelain figurines representing various woodland animals, a few tiny lacquer boxes too small to contain anything of interest, and a handful of crumbling dried flowers. Madame Lulu’s hand stirred, rising as if to brush away the dusty petal that had settled on her cheek, but froze halfway to its goal as Esmé’s flashing eyes snapped over to meet her own. Burgundy lips, starkly lined and livid against pale skin, parted to reveal teeth that somehow seemed sharper than usual. Both of the prone figures on the floor shrank back, bracing for the shockwave that holds the mushroom cloud’s explosive power. Instead, a single word, uttered with the profound finality of a sinking ship:

_"Out.”_


	3. Chapter 3

For a moment, the only sound was the rustling of Lulu’s skirt as she clambered to her feet, gripping the back of a chair for support. Eyes wide and limbs visibly shaking, she stumbled out the door, and Esmé thought with savage pleasure that this was the first time she’d ever seen the fortune-teller look clumsy. The door closed with the quietest of sounds, as though even its wooden and metallic components were afraid to draw the attention of the gaunt figure with the bullwhip. Olaf noted the peculiar way in which the caravan seemed more cramped now that he was alone with Esmé than it had with all three of them.

Mankind’s inclination toward honor and dignity dictates that dying while standing is preferable to dying in other positions. While Olaf himself regularly laughed in the face of honor – or at least in the faces of the allegedly honorable – and preferred to eschew dignity in favor of indecency, he felt in that moment, with Esmé’s shadow falling over him like a sinister quilt, that in this instance he would indeed prefer to die on his feet.

His attempt at getting up off the floor was abortive, a word which here means “cut short as his villainous girlfriend crossed the distance between them in two strides and placed the spiked heel of her right boot directly on the center of his chest.” Looking every inch the conquering hero, she bent down and grasped his chin in her long burgundy-gloved fingers, wrenching his neck into a position Colette would have admired and forcing him, at last, to meet her eyes.

“ _Wait_.”

He waited.

“Put that _thing_ ,” she sniffed, with a contemptuous flick of the eyes toward his rapidly-deflating erection, “away first. The concessions cart was cooking those slimy hot dogs again this morning and I’d rather not be reminded.” His hands dropped to his fly, tucking himself away and feeling an absurd surge of relief that his most critical appendage was, at least for the moment, comparatively protected.

“Esmé, I –“

“At what point,” she enunciated in a crisp staccato, “at precisely _what_ _point_ did I give you the impression that you should to speak to me?”

Unsure as to whether answering the question or obeying the sentiment behind it was more likely to earn him a reprieve from the increasingly acute pain where her heel met his chest, he closed his mouth.

“Better. I knew you were moronic, but I didn’t think you were suicidal.”

With a casual movement, Esmé kicked him to the ground. Another wave of relief rolled over him at the removal of the stiletto’s pressure on his sternum.

“Now get off that filthy rug and sit down at the table like a human being. Vietnamese Floor Dining hasn’t been _in_ in months, and anyway, I doubt your little _fortune-teller_ ,” and here her lips curled into a practiced sneer, “even knows what pho is, let alone has any oc len xao dua in that pathetic excuse for a refrigerator. Why, she probably thinks parsley soda still the height of chic!”

Olaf was never sure how Esmé could always work some element of _in_ culture into any conversation, but as she chuckled to herself over her little joke at Lulu’s expense, he simply thanked his lucky stars that her long-standing obsession with fashion appeared to be taking the edge off of her more recent obsession with injuring him. His lucky stars, had they existed in the literal sense rather than as a figure of speech, would likely have laughed in their far-off heavens at his expression of gratitude, because they would have known.

As long as Esmé Squalor was displeased with him, of course, Olaf’s stars were not lucky at all.


	4. Chapter 4

Of all the expressions that have come to denote that someone is unavailable for something, be it a conversation, a picnic, or a covert reconnaissance mission at the embassy of a small European principality, “all tied up” has become ubiquitous. It avoids any potential for idiomatic confusion by virtue of the simple fact that it is so unlikely that the Person A is literally and physically immobilized by bonds that Person B immediately makes the correct assumption that Person A is simply very, very busy and cannot spare a moment for pleasant exchanges, outdoor repasts, or international espionage.

In Madame Lulu’s caravan that morning, however, such an assumption would have been erroneous. Person A sat bolt upright in a battered mahogany chair. Had he felt the inclination, he could have participated in a conversation, or even, with some advance notice and careful maneuvering, a picnic. Reconnaissance would have proven more difficult, however; Person A, as you have likely gathered, was Count Olaf, and in that particular moment, Count Olaf found himself literally and physically immobilized by bonds.

Still dressed in her preposterously spiky boots and superbly tailored blazer, though with the unusual sartorial addition of a polka-dotted apron, Person B stood with her back to him, bent slightly at the waist and gingerly stirring a pot on the camp stove with a wooden spoon. She did not need to make assumptions about Olaf’s present state, since she herself had secured him in place mere minutes before. Esmé’s remarkable memory had conjured up a recollection of the Devil’s Tongue knot, which she learned during the period when nautical knotcraft was in, and Madame Lulu’s chest of turbans had provided the ligatures. The delicate metallic decorations that clinked and jingled pleasantly on Lulu’s head when she wore these particular turbans were instead digging quite _un_ pleasantly into Olaf’s bony wrists, producing tiny crimson beads of blood that nearly matched the fabric every time he tried to shift into a more comfortable position.  _Only Esmé Squalor_ , he thought ruefully, _could make a man bleed with a silk scarf._

The pot on the stove emitted tendrils of steam, redolent with the aromas of garlic, bay, and beetroot. Olaf heard a delicate sniff and watched as Esmé tilted her head to the side in deliberation. Evidently concluding that something was missing, she leaned over the small counter to reach the rack of spices that hung beneath the cupboard, furnishing the restrained villain with a mouthwatering view as her jodhpurs stretched over the firm globes of her derrière. Swallowing hard, Olaf shifted in his chair in an attempt to conceal the interested little twitches that were beginning to strain his fly.   

Clicking her tongue in frustration, Esmé crouched down and yanked open the door of the comically small refrigerator mounted beneath the counter. She rose to her feet again almost immediately with a few green sprigs clasped delicately in her white hand, which she dropped into the pot before covering it with a lid and rolling her head from side to side, as if cooking were a particularly strenuous activity that had caused her great discomfort. As she arched and craned her slender neck, she caught sight of Olaf out of the corner of her eye, her gaze falling immediately to the tenting of his trousers that he was spectacularly failing to hide. Recalling her earlier allusion to the questionable concession-cart hot dogs, he tried to avoid meeting her eyes.

“Oh, _darling,_ ” she cooed, the tone so unfamiliar it startled him, “what a positively _beastly_ morning you must have had, with that dime-store psychic accosting you like that. Then again,” she added, bending down to trace one sharp burgundy fingernail along his cheekbone, “you’re _such_ a handsome man, I can’t say that I blame her one bit!” Esmé giggled, and Olaf felt his body sag in relief, or rather try to sag, but succeed only in digging the scarves more firmly into his wrists. His girlfriend’s finger, meanwhile, made its way tantalizingly downwards, raising a line of gooseflesh on his neck before continuing its journey down the strip of pallid skin exposed by his unbuttoned shirt. As it began toying with the trail of hair beneath his navel, Esmé leaned in to murmur in his ear. “I think I can give you something that’ll make you forget all about Madame Lulu and this whole sordid affair.”  

It took every ounce of Olaf’s self-control to stop himself from bucking his hips and cutting off all circulation to his feet. Instead, he allowed himself a low hum of pleasure. “Mm, really, my dove? Why don’t you –" 

“ _Borscht!_ ” cried Esmé, flinging her arms wide. “Beautiful, bubbling, _burgundy_ borscht! Oh, it’s the absolute _height_ of fashion to cook your own borscht. I’ve heard the City’s third-most celebrated soup chef has declared bankruptcy!” At the thought of this, she threw her magnificent head back and laughed in pure delight. “Isn’t that just _fabulous_? Anyway, the borscht needed more dill, and this seems to be very fresh, so it should really,“ and here she paused as if trying to recall something precisely, “really _ensure a truly authentic and truly fashionable borscht experience_ , as the culinary experts say _._ ” 

Olaf, of course, had been preparing for an altogether different sort of experience. It did occur to him that, had a culinary expert been on hand, that expert could have chopped, sliced, julienned, or bitten his or her way through the scarves that were impeding his ability to bury himself cock-first in his girlfriend. When a benevolent liberator failed to materialize, as such liberators often do during times of abject need, he returned reluctantly to his dual tasks of remaining as still as possible and listening to a detailed monologue on beet-based soups. Unfortunately, he realized as he registered his girlfriend’s silence and the inquisitive expression on her face, he had evidently missed the moment when monologue was supposed to become dialogue.   

“Wh-, what was that, Essie?”

“I _said_ ,” replied Esmé, in a voice that made him think of quicksand, “that the borscht needs to simmer for another half an hour, and that I think that should be _just_ long enough for you to explain to me that little still-life of debauchery I walked in on after my training session with the lions. Don’t you agree?”

Olaf gulped, but squared his shoulders as best he could in his current position. An ordinary man, faced with the proposition of explaining away a momentary lapse in fidelity, might have begun by sincerely asking forgiveness. An ordinary man might have opted to lay out only the barest facts, in an effort to avoid damning himself with details. An ordinary man might even have quailed at the idea of giving an extended speech about his actions before a critical audience. But Count Olaf was no ordinary man.

Count Olaf was an _actor_.


	5. Chapter 5

“Let me see if I understand this,” said Esmé, leaning back against the counter and taking a drag from the vanilla-scented cigarette she had lit midway through Olaf’s rambling summary, and which she was smoking from a long holder. “You have no particular romantic interest in Madame Lulu.”

“None! Not in the slightest! She means nothing to me, Essie, she was just conven–" 

Esmé’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “And she initiated the concupiscent contact with you, not the other way around?” 

“What?” Olaf stared at her, eyebrow furrowed and mouth turned down at one corner. “There wasn’t any contact with any horns of plenty!”

“Not cornucopia, _concupiscent_. Really, darling, it’s as if Vocabulary Furthering Drills were never _in_ while you were in school! Concupiscent. Carnal. Desirous. _Sensual_.”

“Of _course_ she started it, Esmé! I am,” he reminded her, “an _actor_ , and we actors are forever in pursuit of what the French call _salir-faire_! But in our pursuit, we ourselves are pursued by the winds of pursuing…pursuers, and even the handsomest among us can be blown off course by the tempest of their…well, their pursuit,” he ended, with the nagging suspicion that something in his declamation had not gone entirely to plan. 

“Long-winded metaphors went _out_ with Herman Melville,” said Esmé. “But all right. One last _trifling_ little question, Olaf, darling,” she purred, lowering both the pitch and volume of her voice as she strode slowly toward him, her heels tapping against the floorboards like coffin nails. With a peculiar efficiency of movement that could almost be mistaken for grace, she placed her hands on either side of the chair, slender fingers easily encircling both his wrists and the armrests beneath as she leaned in and lowered herself to his eye level. Her face was a loaded gun. “You wouldn’t be stupid enough to _lie to me_ , would you?”

Olaf’s beady eyes widened, but he didn’t look away. “No,” he said, inwardly proud that he had managed to keep his voice from shaking. Esmé’s black, unblinking stare seemed to be searching for something behind his pupils, and after a few interminable moments of stillness, she appeared to find it. The harsh angles of her face softened almost imperceptibly, though her eyes, as always, remained both fathomless and unfathomable. At that moment, the silence was broken by a clatter on the stove, followed by unpleasant, burbling hiss.

“Oh, for _fuck’s_ sake,” Esmé cried, wheeling around. “The borscht wasn’t supposed to boil for that long! Now instead of a fashionable meal, I’m stuck with a cracked lid and a dreadful mess. Why did you have to ramble on for such a long – oh, never _mind_ , I guess I’ll call for delivery from somebody fashionable. _You_ ,” she spat, with a contemptuous glare, “stay put. Although I guess you really don’t have much choice, now, do you?” And with a nasty laugh that seemed to ring in Olaf’s ears for several moments afterward, she waltzed out the caravan door. 

 


	6. Chapter 6

The inside of Madame Lulu’s caravan, with its vibrant colors and its wild array of textures and its bevy of cheap trinkets, had always felt to Esmé a little like the jewelry box of a very  _out_  person. Her disdain for the fortune-teller’s taste in interior decor, however, failed to make the exterior world any more appealing by comparison, and as she stepped out from the dim isolation of the caravan and into the glaring sunlight and clamor of Caligari Carnival, she wondered how some people seemed to believe in the hackneyed cliché that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.  _Sometimes_ , she thought,  _the grass is dead and brown on both sides of the fence, and the best thing to do is either throttle the farmer with his own barbed wire, or torch the field and start over_.

There was a reason Esmé Squalor worked in high finance, rather than in agriculture.

She stalked viciously through the fairground, her savage pace and her scowl parting the crowd of tourists and carnival employees like a sea. When she reached the outskirts of the grounds, she did not step ashore in a land of milk and honey promised in accordance with a divine covenant, but she did step into something more immediately useful: a phone booth of glass and metal, built in accordance with a municipal telecommunications contract.

Having wrestled the door shut behind her and cursed it roundly, a phrase which here means “muttered increasingly vile and anatomically improbable obscenities at its rusty hinges, all the while fully aware that they had very little control over their maintenance schedule relative to their rate of oxidation,” Esmé produced an ornately-embossed change purse from her blazer pocket and began jamming coins into the appropriate slot. With a yank, she dislodged the earpiece and pressed it to her ear as she jabbed a series of numbers into the keypad from memory.

“Yes,” she said. A pause as the voice on the other end of the line asked a question. “Not too far at all, actually.” Another pause. “Yes, with Olaf.”

The line exploded briefly. 

“Well, that’s why I’m calling you. I just walked in on him with the fortune-teller. Yes, I  _know_ , but he thinks he knows otherwise and…exactly. So when Fernald mentioned to me in the lion pit that he was taking an  _awfully_  long time coming out of the caravan, I went back and listened through the door for a while, and it was  _appalling_ …oh, his usual. The name-calling, the choking, all of it…just like that time in the lecture hall, exactly. And to top it all off, when I confronted him, he tried to tell me she was  _convenient_. I just,” and here she drew herself up to her full height, shoulders back and jaw clenched in unmistakable defiance. “I will  _not_  become a  _convenience_ to the likes of Count Olaf.”

During the long, long pause that followed, Esmé listened intently, and the longer she listened, the further the corners of her mouth curved upward, and when she spoke again, it was with a sly grin.   

“That sounds  _perfect_. No, no, I’m more than ready. What’s that thing Lincoln Steffens said? …Yes, that! Well, today I’ve seen  _my_ future, and it most certainly does  _not_ work.” A peal of laughter floated tinnily out from the receiver. 

“An hour? Marvelous. Oh, I just told him I was calling for delivery from someone fashionable, so do try to put in some effort and wear something  _in_. Yes. Yes, as usual, he really should have, but he didn’t. Yes. Yes.  _Oh_  yes. Mm, you too, my darling. See you soon.”


	7. Chapter 7

Finding himself alone in the caravan, with nothing to do but listen to the creaky, cooling stove and watch the flurries of dust moats drifting through the shafts of late morning sun that spilled in through the caravan’s streaky windows, Olaf’s thoughts turned to the scene that had just played out. His mind was reeling. In the time he’d been dating Esmé, he had come to see her as many things: a paragon of ambition, a virtuoso of wickedness, a _hell_ of a lover. He had seen her aflame with jealousy, seen her effervescent with glee, seen her enraged to the point of homicide, but never before this morning had he seen her _domestic_ , and it was the image of her bent over the stove that he couldn’t quite shake. For once, the focus of his mind’s eye wasn’t on the curves of her ass under the sinfully tight jodhpurs, nor on the apparently endless length of her legs, nor even on the sensuous sharpness of her jawline, which so often distracted him when he caught sight of her in profile. No, Olaf’s focus was on the polka-dotted apron.

An apron, as you probably know, is a utilitarian article of clothing, a phrase which here means that its principal purpose is functional, rather than fashionable or criminal. This practicality means it is well-suited to people like mothers, who devote endless physical and emotional labor to what one popular song once called “keeping the home fires burning,” and ill-suited to people like Esmé Squalor, who prefer an alternative and villainous interpretation of that particular song. But an apron, like nearly any other object, can also act as a symbol. It has come to symbolize the home, and the bond between people who share a home, transforming its walls and floors and outdated window treatments into a place of refuge, warmth, and love.

 _Love_. Olaf’s heart seemed to trip over itself at the concept, unaccustomed and inured as he was to it. Love was what convinced gullible people to abandon their purses and wallets during a house fire and save their worthless children instead. Love led to sacrifice and overblown heroics, and it had no place in the life of such a clever and handsome man as he. But with a sinking feeling in his stomach and a lightness in his head that he associated with long nights and red wine, the realization dawned. The apron had done much more than protect Esmé’s lion-taming outfit from beetroot stains and charcoal smudges. It was a domestic innuendo, softening some of her untouchable, irreproachable glamour and suggesting the kind of life Olaf was almost certain he didn’t want. Yet when the tableau of the stove and the apron rose up again to the forefront of his mind, he felt something perilously close to love for Esmé Squalor, and, heaven help him, he _liked_ it.

Before he could delve any deeper into the disquieting implications of this revelation, however, the caravan door swung inward, framing Esmé in the doorway. Her angular form partially blocked the sunshine streaming in from behind her, and for a moment she seemed to him like an abyssal chasm separating two seas of light.

The chasm spoke sweetly, her familiar features coming into focus as his eyes adjusted to the sudden burst of sunlight. “Delivery’s on the way. Why don’t you take a little nap while we’re waiting?” Relieved at the prospect of stretching out on Madame Lulu’s divan, preferably Esmé wrapped around him, Olaf nodded and sat up a bit straighter in anticipation of release, feeling a little closer to freedom with every step Esmé took toward him. When she reached his chair, however, she did not busy herself with untying the Devil’s Tongue knots. Instead, she slid one hand into the breast pocket of her blazer, withdrawing a small vial and an elaborately-monogrammed burgundy handkerchief. She tilted the vial with a practiced gesture, darkening a patch of the silk with its contents.

“ _No_ ,” said Olaf. “No, no, _no_ , Esmé, that really won’t be necess–“

As usual, he never got to finish his sentence.


	8. Chapter 8

Olaf came to with a start, wincing as the wounds on his wrists began to bleed again. He spent a deeply unpleasant few moments registering sound and movement, unable to attach any significance to either until the wet blanket of haze in his brain lifted further. Snatches of sentences drifted aimlessly through his skull, leaving no more of an imprint on his mind than long-dead leaves skittering over frozen earth.

“ _Shit_ , Essie,” he grumbled as he stretched his neck, “if that’s how you think naptime works, it’s a good thing you’re barren.“ 

“That’s no way to talk to your girlfriend in mixed company, Olaf. You never could figure that out.” The brisk, no-nonsense voice with its slightly flattened vowels came not from Esmé, who was standing at the counter, pouring wine into two mismatched goblets, but from someone on the divan, so that Olaf had to crane his neck to see who had spoken.

Initially, he assumed that whatever drug Esmé had given him to induce his involuntary nap must have included an hallucinogenic compound of some sort. He had, of course, very little knowledge of either pharmacology or toxicology, but the figure perched on the low sofa simply could not under any circumstances be who it looked like. When narrowing his eyes and shaking his head failed to dispel the specter, however, a creeping anger began to uncoil itself in his chest, followed almost immediately by icy tendrils of fear. _Please_ , he pleaded inwardly, _please, if anyone is listening – maybe the muse of the theatre, what’s her name, Melamine, right? – please, Melamine, I’ll do anything, just don’t let it be her_. But the voice rang out again, and it evoked the familiar sullen helplessness that always descended upon him, sooner or later, in the presence of Dr. Georgina Orwell.  

“Oh, for crying out loud, wipe that look off your face. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Esmé let out a sound halfway between a giggle and a snort as she handed one of the wine goblets to the seated woman. “Why, Georgie, I bet he thinks he’s seeing one _now_! Don’t you remember? Nobody wanted to tell him about how you…” Here Esmé trailed off, peering intently at the ring on Georgina’s left middle finger. “Is that a real garnet,” she asked, “or just a very fine dissimulation?” 

Olaf grinned with pleasure at the ire such a comment was sure to draw from the optometrist. He still hadn’t the faintest idea how she was sitting in front of him, rather than mixed into the ash heap behind Lucky Smells Lumber Mill, but in all the many, many years he had known Georgina, she had never once failed to take offense when she felt she perceived the barest suggestion that she might be anything less than fabulously wealthy. It was, she had once unwisely confided in him, a sore spot from her rural childhood in the Hinterlands, and that sore spot had grown into a necrotic wound ever since she lost her first practice. She wouldn’t take kindly to the implication that she would stoop to wearing costume jewelry, particularly not from someone like Esmé Squalor. _Surely she’ll shout at her_ , he thought gleefully, _maybe even slap her_. _Any minute now…_  

But to Olaf’s utter consternation, and as if it were the most natural thing in the world, Georgina extended her hand to Esmé, palm downwards and fingers splayed invitingly, and murmured, “Well, why don’t you see for yourself?”

In lieu of a verbal reply, Esmé pulled the proffered hand closer, inspecting the ring from all possible angles. “A real garnet that size must have cost you a _fortune_!”

“Only if I’d bought it,” Georgina said. “I’ve had it my whole life. It was my grandmother’s. The women in my family have always had,” she paused, eyes raking brazenly up and down Esmé’s body, “ _impeccable_ taste.”

At that moment Olaf, feeling more and more that he was missing something, witnessed a second phenomenon that he had never seen before. Right before his beady eyes, her thumb rubbing lazy circles on his ex-girlfriend’s hand, his current girlfriend, Esmé Gigi Geniveve Squalor, the City’s sixth-most important financial advisor, seasoned model of villainy, treachery, and depravity, blushed.


	9. Chapter 9

If you have ever found yourself in a situation so unprecedented – a word which here means “bizarre and extraordinary to the point of absurdity” – that you felt physically off-balance, as though you were suddenly aboard a carnival ride that you never intended to take, then you can begin to understand Count Olaf’s disequilibrium as he watched the scene unfolding in front of him. If you have ever watched a beautiful person place a suggestive hand on your partner’s arm and experienced a deluge of emotions as the sight formed an icy pool of jealousy in your chest, but a warm tide of arousal in your groin, then you have a fairly firm basis for empathy with Count Olaf’s predicament. And if you have ever been bound to a chair in a fortune-teller’s caravan, looking on in utter befuddlement as a former lover whom you had presumed dead flirted unabashedly with your girlfriend, then I strongly suggest that you close this document, Count Olaf, and turn yourself in to the police immediately, thereby taking the first of many steps down the long and winding road toward atonement for your many, many crimes.

Assuming for the time being that you are not Count Olaf, but that you have at some time in your life experienced an unexpected event or internal conflict, then you have probably noticed that the human brain often fails to process such situations gracefully. It tends to manifest its confusion through an assortment of verbal inconveniences ranging from mild stuttering to moderate babbling to, if you are especially unlucky, permanent muteness. In Count Olaf’s case, the sight of Georgina Orwell not only alive, but also openly disporting herself with Esmé Squalor, appeared to have robbed him of all vocabulary beyond monosyllabic interrogatives. He inhaled deeply in an attempt to steady himself, then spoke, a single word mingling with the rush of exhaled breath.    

“ _How_?”

The two women paused, exchanged a glance, and immediately burst into giggles.

“ _What_?”

At the note of pure incredulity in Olaf’s voice, Esmé’s titter bloomed into a guffaw, and Georgina’s snicker grew into a cackle, and for a few moments, the caravan reverberated with laughter, as though he had told a particularly side-splitting joke.

“We’d better explain it to him,” Esmé chortled as she began to settle back into her usual hauteur, “before he works himself up into some sort of episode. Though I suppose you might enjoy seeing him in a straitjacket…”

“Well, then, it couldn’t hurt to push him just a _little_ further, could it?” Georgina jerked sharply on Esmé’s hand, tugging her down so she landed crosswise on her lap, rather than offering up the more customary seating option of the open space on the divan. “Besides, you haven’t greeted me properly yet.”

“Haven’t I? How _ghastly_ of me, however shall I –“

For once, it was Esmé Squalor who didn’t get the chance to finish her sentence. Georgina snaked her fingers into her close-cropped black hair, pulling her down so that her warm, dark eyes met the optometrist’s slate grey ones, and kissed her full on the mouth.

Very few moments in Georgina Orwell’s life could be described as even remotely near perfect. The day of her graduation from optometry school, beaming as she posed for photos with her diploma solid and solemn in her hand, tangible proof that she had finally made something of herself, stood out as one such moment. The first morning of her trip to Paris was another. It was the first vacation she could afford to take after opening her private practice, and as she woke to the sounds and scents of an unfamiliar city streaming in through the open window, she had felt for first time the pleasurable paralysis of sudden and complete autonomy. Despite the expanse of intervening years, she thought, the pride of graduation day and the exhilaration of that Parisian morning always seemed to rise up in her, fresh and brisk, whenever she felt Esmé kiss her back.  

And feeling Esmé’s burgundy lips part, her tongue sliding slick and wet and hot into Georgina’s mouth as the man who had managed to break her heart and ruin her career in one fell swoop looked on? Why, that wasn’t just near to perfect. That was the very definition of the word.


	10. Chapter 10

As usual, when presented with a front-row seat to a perfect moment, Olaf managed to botch it by opening his mouth.

“Will one of you,” he growled, pleased to find that at least some of his vocabulary seemed to have returned, “and I really don’t care which, tell me what in the _hell_ is going on?”

Brushing her lips over Georgina’s one final time for good measure, Esmé slipped off her lap and perched beside her on the divan. Olaf noted, with a queer twisting sensation in his chest, that she did not let go of the other woman’s hand.

Having finally accepted that she was not a ghost, and with Esmé no longer obstructing his view, he paused for a moment to survey Georgina. Her signature cat-eye glasses were the same as ever. She’d changed her hair again, this time to a shade of auburn that reminded him of raw cinnamon, though he was secretly pleased to see she had kept the style she’d worn at the mill. The blunt bangs and angular bob reinforced the message of her immaculate white suit-dress, which had remained spotless despite the infamous Hinterlands dust, as though even the tiny airborne particles knew better than to test her patience. There was something vulpine about her, all reddish hair and pointed face and canny eyes, and Olaf couldn’t shake the feeling that he was staring down a fox from inside his own trap.

“You know, even without a valid optometry license, I could still teach you keep your eyes up here,” said Georgina. Olaf lifted his eyes from her shapely, stocking-clad calves, hoping against hope that she hadn’t noticed the way he paused when he reached the curve of her waist – _oh, god help him, was she wearing a waist cincher under that dress?_ – and the swell of her breasts beneath the snowy fabric of the suit jacket.

She noticed. She _always_ noticed.

The movement was so sudden that it took him a moment to register what had caused the crack of pain in his jaw. Only when his eyes traveled up the ebony rod and found pale fingers curled around the handle did he realize that Georgina had caught him under the chin with her cane, and was now using it to direct his gaze where she wanted it. Still seated on the divan, left hand resting gently under Esmé’s right, her other hand maintained unyielding upward pressure under his chin, forcing his eyes heavenward and pressing the unyielding tip against his throat.

“Reach into my bag, will you, Esmé? There’s something useful in the front pocket.” Disentangling their hands, Esmé rooted around in the leather medical bag beside the divan before producing a strip of black fabric and handing it over. Georgina leaned her cane against Madame Lulu’s armoire and edged around the coffee table to reach Olaf, wrapping the blindfold tightly over his eyes and securing it like a tourniquet. 

“Standard procedure for filthy little man-children who can’t listen to a woman if their eyes are open. Now,” she began, settling back onto the divan and slipping underneath Esmé’s outstretched arm to settle against her side, “let me explain. I assume that when you asked ‘how?’ you meant, ‘but, Georgina, how did you survive the fall into the furnace at Lucky Smells, which was a direct result of my pettiness and incompetence?’” 

Olaf opened his mouth to protest, closed it again, them nodded, rolling his eyes under the blindfold.

“Don’t you remember what I told you that night when you asked how I got past the angry mob?”

A noncommittal shrug in response. “You were standing there in a purple pantsuit, berating me after I broke up with you, _again_. Why would I have paid any attention to what you were saying?”

Now it was Georgina’s turn to roll her eyes, turning to the woman beside her. “How have you put up with him for this long?” she muttered.

Esmé leaned in conspiratorially, brushing Georgina’s hair back so she could murmur in her ear. “He was my acting teacher, remember? I knew what I was getting into. And besides, you’ve fucked him too, so I’m sure you remember his… _well_.”

Between the way Esmé’s lips brushed against the shell of her ear as she spoke and the memories she had evoked with her words, Georgina suddenly found the air in the caravan a few degrees warmer than it had been moments earlier. She took a moment to compose herself before turning back toward Olaf.

“My exact words that night,” she continued, “when you asked me how I got inside, were ‘I don’t trust you with all my secrets.’ Surely you must have realized by now that only a piss-poor Volunteer would work near a furnace that wasn’t connected to some variant on the Vertical Flame Diversion.”

Olaf had surely _not_ realized this, but, he reminded himself quickly, that was probably only because he hadn’t been trying particularly hard. “Of course I knew that. I figured it out months ago. Years, even. In fact,” he added, “I probably realized it before you did, but you didn’t realize that I realized because I’m very, very discreet.”

“Ah, yes,” cut in Esmé’s voice from somewhere to his left. “The very soul of discretion. That must be why I caught you with your pants down this morning, mustn’t it, _darling_?”

Georgina’s low, throaty laugh echoed around the caravan. “That was cruel, Esmé." 

“Mm, high praise, coming from you…”

“Not sorry to butt in,” interjected Olaf, “and full offense intended, Georgina, but I saw the fireball from that furnace when you fell into it.”

Heaving a sigh, the optometrist once again returned to the matter at hand. “You have a lot of nerve calling yourself an arsonist if you don’t understand that a fire grows larger in the presence of increased airflow.” This revelation prompted no reaction, so she tried again, this time employing the brittle singsong she saved for her most obtuse patients. “Opening the furnace door created a draft. The draft drew the flame outward, and that left me me with just enough time to drop down the ash chute. Lost my glasses, though. Pity. Had to make new ones.”

“But they found a body. I saw it in the Daily Punctilio. There was a photo and everything.”  

“Oh _please,_ as if _you’ve_ never stolen a body from a morgue and dressed it in your second-best pair of boots and stored it in a furnace in preparation for a cunning escape – oh, wait, you haven’t, because despite all your scheming, you’re somehow _never actually prepared_.” Her voice began to raise in volume and pitch. “ _Just_ like that time at the bar mitzvah, and every other solitary _stinking_ time I trusted you, and you let me down or left me for _dead_.” On the word “dead,” Georgina’s voice broke, and Esmé drew her in so that her auburn head rested on the padded shoulder of her blazer, stroking her hair with one hand and wrapping her other arm around her waist. 

“Oh, Georgie. No one’s leaving you for dead this time,” she murmured into her hair, kissing the top of her head in a surprisingly tender gesture while glaring daggers at Count Olaf – a phrase which here means “looking at him as though she would very much enjoy using him as a life-sized doll of the sort often erroneously linked with certain Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices.” “ _No one_ , right?”

“I wasn’t planning on it,” replied Olaf sullenly. 

Georgina’s reply was muffled. “You never plan anything.”

“But we do, don’t we, my darling?” asked Esmé slyly, tilting Georgina’s face upwards with one long finger and covering her lips with delicate kisses until she felt the corners of the other woman’s mouth begin to lift. “That’s why we always have such _fun_.”


	11. Chapter 11

For Olaf, the next few minutes passed in a haze of muttered conversation, rustling fabric, and a series of drawn-out pauses punctuated only by soft exhalations of breath. Eventually, however, the voices from the divan returned to the level of audibility, a phrase which here means “became loud enough that Count Olaf could focus his energy somewhat less on eavesdropping and somewhat more on processing the barrage of new information that had rained down on him that day, which, judging by heat of the sun as it beat down through the caravan’s skylight and onto his blindfolded face, wasn’t even halfway over.”

“I guess we could try taking them off,” said Esmé, a frown as evident in her voice as it was on her face. “He _did_ agree not to leave you for dead. That sounds like progress to me.”

“Hmph.” Georgina deliberated for a moment. “Fine. But leave the ankles. It’s more fun to make him squirm when he knows he can’t run.”

Satisfied with the compromise, Esmé picked her way around the morning’s detritus, neatly skirted the coffee table and, to Olaf’s immense relief, unfastened the Devil’s Tongue knots that bound his wrists to the arms of his chair. The blindfold soon joined the bloodied scarves in a silky pile on the table, and he blinked a few times in quick succession as his eyes adjusted to the reappearance of sunlight and visual stimuli. With his vision restored more or less to normal and the feeling slowly prickling back into his hands, he turned his attention back to Esmé, who was at that moment settling back onto the divan, propping herself up on the richly-upholstered armrest and folding her legs onto Georgina’s lap as the optometrist laid a possessive hand on her jodhpur-clad thigh.

Olaf shifted his eyes from Georgina’s hand to Esmé’s inscrutable face as he tried desperately to make his next question sound casual. “So, how long has this,” he gestured vaguely with still-tingling hands toward the divan, “been going on?”

“Oh, absolutely _ages_ , darling! You didn’t really think someone like _me_ could get everything she needed from someone like _you_ , did you?”

The image of Esmé and the apron rose up in his mind’s eye again, unbidden, and the sudden downward shift of his eyes answered her question.

“Why, you _did_! How _fabulously_ naïve! Say, Georgina, did you know our Olaf was such a romantic?”

“Never seemed that romantic to me,” she replied. “Then again, my judgment’s probably still cloudy from that time he tried to _drown me in a river_ , then apologized for it ten years later by turning up at my doorstep with a handful of geraniums from my own planter box and dragging me into a scheme that lost me my optometry practice, _for the second time_.” She shrugged. “So maybe I’m biased." 

“That’s probably it,” interjected Olaf. “You’ve always taken things like that so perso–“

Under the sudden weight of two steely glares, he wisely refrained from further comment.

“ _Any_ way,” continued Esmé, “when I found you with Madame Lulu this morning, I figured that since a little plural intimacy obviously didn’t bother you, you might as well know about me and Georgina. Oh, I thought about just _telling_ you, of course, but then I remembered what you taught us in acting class. Don’t you remember? During the playwriting unit?”

Olaf shook his head. Between Esmé and Georgina, he was beginning to feel as though he was starring as the “before” patient in an advertisement for memory enhancement medication.

“It was the first week in April. You had on that black shirt – you know, the silk one that I tore to ribbons with my nails the first time we…” She trailed off for a moment. “At any rate, you walked into the lecture hall in that shirt, and you said, ‘Students, neophytes, aspirants to the revered title of actor, today I am going to share with you the only rule of the theatre that can never be broken, other than all the ones about whistling backstage. That rule is this: In the theatre, you must never _tell_ an audience when you could _show them_ instead.’”

“Ah, yes, a very wise axiom,” Olaf affirmed, sitting up a little straighter. “I invented it myself, you know.”

“Well, I’ve never forgotten it,” she continued, “which is why I didn’t bother telling you about Georgina.”

Olaf had just drawn breath to rejoin that he really hadn’t intended that particular lesson as an incitement to carrying out clandestine romantic liaisons with optometrists whom he happened, on occasion, to have pushed off bridges, but the oncoming grumble died in his throat when he realized what his girlfriend meant.

He watched, so straight and so still that it seemed he was still lashed in place, as Esmé slowly and deliberately stretched her body full-length across the divan, draping herself more enticingly over Georgina’s lap. Letting her legs fall open so that her left foot brushed the floor while her right foot rested against the far arm of the sofa, she locked eyes with the hypnotist and unfastened the topmost button her blouse.   

No room remained for dissembling, deception, or denial. Innuendo had become superfluous. The two most treacherous women Count Olaf had ever known were together, in every sense of the word, and they weren’t just planning to tell him. They intended to show him.


	12. Chapter 12

A thousand meters below the surface of the ocean there exists a nearly pitch-dark region known as the bathypelagic zone, which is inhabited with the sort of unsettling and sinister creatures that prefer to live in frigid areas, far from the sun. One such creature, the deep-sea anglerfish, makes her living in this tenebrous expanse by harnessing the power of bioluminescence, a phrase which here means “evolving a small, phosphorescent organ that dangles above her fanged jaws.” This organ, known to marine biologists and their henchpeople as the esca, emits an eerie gleam that draws other denizens of these light-starved waters into its tenuous orb, whereupon the female anglerfish decides whether to prey upon them or take them as a mate.

Holding the steady black gaze as she reached out her garnet-ringed hand to unclasp the fastenings of Esmé's riding jacket, Georgina felt the inexorable pull of a sphere of light in stygian darkness, and knew that she would risk being devoured if it meant she could bathe in its glow.

As Esmé raised her torso off the divan and allowed the jacket to slide off her shoulders and down her arms to the floor, the optometrist seized the opportunity to wrap one arm around her waspish waist and pulled her upright, chest flush against her own and startled face a scant inch away. “Mm, much better." Her hand slipped smoothly under Esmé’s and took over the task of unfastening the mother-of-pearl buttons. “Makes it easier for me to get you out of this ridiculous blouse.”

“ _First_ of all,” Esmé countered, “as usual, this blouse isn’t ridiculous, it’s _in_. And secondly,” she added, this time in a much silkier tone, “I think I can make it even easier.” With a nimble movement, she shifted to straddle her, draping slender arms around her neck. “See? It’s so much faster if you can use both hands." 

Georgina peered up from over her glasses, eyebrows raised and lips quirked into a half-smile. “Oh, but I said _easier,_ Esmé. Not faster.” She leaned forward to nip gently at the base of Esmé’s throat, relishing the vibration of a stifled groan. “You know how much I like it when you let me savor” – another button, a brush of lips above her sternum – “every” – one more button and the tip of Georgina’s tongue traced a long vertical line between Esmé’s breasts, her cheek brushing against satin and lace as her lover arched her back – “ _inch_ of you.”

Esmé found herself torn between her sudden suspicion that taking one’s time might just be on its way _in_ and her overwhelming need to feel the heat of bare flesh. Deciding for once to seek a compromise, she fisted a handful of auburn hair out of the way and fell upon the soft, exposed skin of Georgina’s neck. The optometrist considered mentioning that this belied the idea of expediting her task, but the very concept of objection ceased to exist when Esmé focused her attention on the deliciously sensitive pulse point below her right ear. Under the triple assault of supple lips, pointed tongue, and sharp teeth, Georgina could do nothing but moan, hips jerking upward and blunt nails threatening to tear through delicate fabric as she clawed at Esmé’s back. When the woman astride her abruptly halted her ministrations and cupped her flushed cheeks in cool, slender hands, she realized just how close she had come to begging.     

“Consider that payment in kind,” Esmé murmured, fingering the bite mark over her jugular, “with interest.”


	13. Chapter 13

For a moment the two were still, each catching her breath and eyeing the other. Esmé looked down, taking in Georgina’s wide-blown pupils, skewed glasses, and heaving chest with a surge of pride that her provocation had proven such an unmitigated success. Georgina looked up, noting with satisfaction the rosy flush that colored Esmé’s cheeks and spread across her chest.

Looking across the coffee table at both of them, Olaf felt neither pride nor satisfaction. He felt frustration, and, like most frustrated people, he felt that others should be made aware of it. With a theatrical clearing of his throat designed to vent spleen rather than dislodge phlegm, he succeeded in drawing some much-needed attention back to himself.

“Oh, _darling_ ,” cooed Esmé, “I nearly forgot you were there!”

This was not what Olaf wanted to hear. “Well, then, surprise, I suppose,” he said. “Look, I’ve been escorted off the premises of 27 gentlemen’s clubs, 15 topless bars, nine massage parlors, and one extremely misleading Thai cabaret, so if you ladies will excuse me, I’ll just…” and here he bent to untie the scarf from his left ankle.

“You’ll just _nothing_.” Georgina’s voice had regained its steely edge. “Sit. Back. Down.”

Olaf sat.

“You know, Georgie,” Esmé remarked, “given who we’re dealing with, I’d say he’s behaving himself _remarkably_ well.”

“What, because he hasn’t managed to destroy anyone's career in the past half hour? That’s hardly an accomplishment.”

“Well, no, but look at him. Is there anything that… _stands out_ to you?”

Georgina surveyed Olaf. His rumpled paisley shirt still hung open, revealing the sprinkling of wiry hair over his lean chest. His hands remained motionless, knuckles perhaps a few shades whiter than the last time she had glanced over at him as they gripped the chair arms. This struck her as odd, and as she cast her eyes over the sizable bulge tenting Olaf’s flared linen trousers, which appeared to swell further under her scrutiny, she suddenly caught Esmé’s meaning.    

“He hasn’t touched himself.” Her tone, like her expression, was carefully neutral. “I didn’t think he had that kind of” – and here she glanced down at the ligatures around his ankles – “restraint.”

“Exactly. It’s _almost_ as if he might be waiting for permission. Don’t you think that kind of thing might call for a little _positive reinforcement_?” She dipped her head, hot breath tickling the optometrist’s ear as she dropped her voice to a seductive whisper. “And didn’t you tell me once how much you’d like to watch?” 

Georgina’s wicked smirk told her everything she needed to know.


	14. Chapter 14

“Olaf, darling,” Esmé intoned, alighting on the edge of Madame Lulu’s Murphy bed, which she had folded down from the wall of the caravan with remarkable ease, “would you care to join me?”

He sensed a trap. Hazarding a glance toward Georgina but detecting no immediate risk of bodily harm in the event that he accepted the offer, Olaf loosened the scarves around his ankles and gingerly took his first steps of the afternoon. Wincing slightly at the stiffness in his legs, among other appendages, he settled himself beside Esmé and gripped his knees for want of more innocent options for hand placement.

Esmé, her blouse still halfway unbuttoned to reveal small, firm breasts nestled in black lace, eschewed even the pretense of innocence. Caressing Olaf’s stubbly cheek with one hand, she spoke in a lilting tone he recognized from many, many pleasurably sleepless nights. “You’ve been watching us.”

It was not a question.

Her hand slipped down from his cheek, retracing the path her nail had followed that morning before she interrupted herself with her lecture on the _in_ -ness of borscht. This time, however, she didn’t stop when she reached the line of hair trailing south from his navel. Instead she leaned closer, purposefully pressing her breasts against his side, and finally, _finally_ cupped his erection through his trousers. “Mm, and you _liked_ it.”

“Did you really think I wouldn’t?” Olaf growled. A sound between a sob and a groan followed, filling the caravan as Esmé dexterously unzipped his fly and wrapped her hand around his throbbing length. “Oh, _ohh_ , Essie, _unh_ ,” he rasped, hips bucking of their own accord as she began to stroke him precisely the way she knew he liked it, slicking the copious liquid leaking from the head down onto his shaft and punctuating each gliding motion with a sinful little twist of her wrist that threatened to send him hurtling over the edge far, far too soon.

Fortunately, she seemed to intuit his concern and paused, putting her hands to use divesting him of unnecessary clothing instead. His purple shirt with its outdated print fell to the floor, joined moments later by his tattered leather belt. When his trousers joined the pile – _so glad I was out of clean underwear this morning_ , he thought – Esmé stood back to inspect her work.

“ _Lovely_ ,” she sighed, finally shrugging off her blouse. Having unzipped her boots and tossed them aside, she made equally quick work of the jodhpurs, shimmying them over her hips before peeling them slowly off each leg. The sensation of two pairs of eyes drinking in the planes and angles and curves of her body was almost tangible, and she took particular care to emphasize the sway of her hips for Georgina’s benefit as she stepped back toward the bed where Olaf lay propped up on a pile of shabby pillows.

Esmé reached out for his hands and settled them on her jutting hipbones as she knelt over his thighs, tantalizingly close to his straining erection. “Oh, I’m _going_ to fuck you,” she assured him, voice dripping with pure aphrodisia. “But you’re going to do something for _me_ first.”

Ragged breathing punctuated his reply. “Anything. Always. Just _soon_.”

“I want you to touch me,” she said.  

“ _Yes_ , Essie, _please_.” Olaf’s fingers were already slipping beneath the lace into smooth, soft folds. “So _wet_ , god, you’re _dripping_ –“  

She clasped his forearm, withdrawing his hand as she peered intently into his startled face. “And why might that be?” she asked sweetly, bringing his wrists together above his head and holding them in place one-handed against the pillows. “You’re _dreadfully_ handsome, darling, but you were all tied up until five minutes ago, and even you can’t work that quickly,” she pointed out helpfully, sliding her underwear down her legs one-handed and slicking his blunt tip with her arousal. “So why am I positively _drenched_ , then, hmm?”

Olaf’s reply came as a hushed whisper through ragged breathing, his gaze fixed on the juncture of Esmé’s thighs. “Georgina.”

“ _Georgina_.” And with that, she engulfed him.


	15. Chapter 15

From her vantage point on the divan, one bare foot tucked beneath her with the other resting against the edge of the coffee table, Georgina let the scene wash over her. For all his myriad failings in the interim – _and they really don’t make numbers that high_ , she thought ruefully – Olaf still managed to retain the louche appeal that had drawn her to him all those years ago, back when she was still a blonde and he hadn’t yet begun to view their romantic strolls over the Pont Neuf as dry runs for eventual attempted homicide. The laughter lines of his student days had eroded into crags that put her in mind of chalk cliffs and salt air. His body, slightly softer around the edges, had not lost its ropy muscles and still projected an overall impression of leanness, particularly around the arms. And as for his cock, _well_. That was precisely as Georgina remembered it: gratifyingly thick, with a slight upward curve and a prominent vein running the length of the underside, long enough to lend credence to the old saying about tall men with big noses.

Yes, she admitted to herself, shifting slightly to relieve the pressure building between her legs, if she was going to watch Esmé fucking someone else, Count Olaf was far from the worst option.

His theatrical training had given him a remarkable penchant for narration, and as Esmé sank slowly down onto him, straddling his hips like a wanton goddess, a litany of filth filled the caravan.

“Ohhhhhh _god_ that’s good, Essie, _fuck,_ you have no _idea_ how good you feel, so _tight_ , been wanting this for _days_.” His voice grew downright lecherous, silk over gravel. “That outfit has been trying my patience _sorely_ , you know. Do you know how close I came,” he asked, “to bending you over right there in the lion pit in front of all of my henchmen and all of the freaks and showing you how to _really_ use that whip? And you know what I think?” He canted his hips as best he could from his position, angling himself to strike the spot inside her that he knew could make her scream. “I think you would have _liked_ it.”  

Spurred on by the soft whimper he received in response as Esmé began to roll her hips, he continued, his voice no more than a thinly-veiled growl now. “Mmm, that’s right, Essie, fuck yourself on my cock, oh _shit_ , yes, come on, take it. Squeeze it tighter, _ohh_ yeah, that’s it, you like an audience, don’t you? Little _slut_ needs an audience?” At this, Esmé’s whimper blossomed into a throaty moan, and Olaf sensed an opportunity as he felt the taut muscles of her thighs quiver. With a fluid movement recalling the death roll of some reptilian jungle predator, he toppled Esmé from her perch astride him, hitching one of her slender legs over his shoulder. “Oh, _yes_ ,” he purred, teasing her entrance with his throbbing member and grinning as her hips undulated in search of more friction. “Show me how much you want me, _that’s_ my girl, love it when you’re spread open for me like this, so I can just…” Rather than finishing his sentence, he thrust himself into her with more force than she’d expected, and Esmé cried out. “ _Just_ like that, Essie, yeah, gonna make you feel me for _days_ , gonna make you come all over my cock, oh _f-u-u-uck me_ , does _Georgina,_ ” and he pronounced her name like something between an obscenity and an invocation, “make you feel like this, you dirty  _bi_ –" 

Olaf turned his head to send a smug glare in the optometrist’s direction, but found that that she was no longer reclining on the divan. A split second later he understood why. With an almighty _crack_ , the silver knobstick handle made contact with his lower ribs and sent him sprawling against the wall, clutching at his side. Georgina’s voice rang out from the end of the bed.

“I was hoping you would ask that.”


	16. Chapter 16

Pausing to prop her cane within easy reach against the doorframe, Georgina smirked as she contemplated the value of what the French and their admirers call a _mot juste_ , not only because such people believe that the French language implies sophistication, but also because the term contains only two syllables, whereas “the right word at the right time” requires seven. She had settled on “rode hard and put away wet,” a phrase which to her meant “thoroughly fucked in all possible senses of the word,” and which therefore seemed an eminently appropriate descriptor for Olaf, both literally and figuratively. When she turned back toward the bed, however, the barb poised on the tip of her tongue, she caught sight of Esmé and felt her breath hitch.

Some people in this world, upon becoming so enamored that they must resort to metaphor, have chosen to compare the object of their affection to a summer’s day, though only one man has ever done this successfully enough to become famous for it. Others, sometimes gardeners but more often people with little imagination, see their sweetheart as some sort of flower. In fact, it has become so common to liken one’s partner to an organic object or phenomenon that there hardly remains in any naturalist’s encyclopedia an entry that has not, at some point, been hoodwinked into participating in an analogy. In the cases of the most seriously afflicted, however, the beloved comes to represent not a tangible thing, but an idea.

In Georgina’s eyes, Esmé was pure geometry. Splayed out nude over jewel-toned bedding, all flat stomach and supple limbs and sharp bones, she seemed to embody that sublime point where mathematics collide with aesthetic, where the satisfaction of _quod erat demonstrandum_ (a Latin phrase which here means “I have gone to the trouble of verifying this information through a series of logical deductions, so please stop bothering me with questions about the equal measure of corresponding angles”) turns to reverence at the imposing symmetry of a fractal mosaic.

Esmé had a calculating mind, but her body was a work of art, and Georgina had become a connoisseur.

The carefully-chosen _mot juste_ died on her tongue. Wordlessly, as thoroughly hypnotized as any of her patients, she reached behind her back to lower the zipper of her dress, relieved that she had chosen to divest herself of the suit jacket around the time Olaf had groaned her name in that tone of utter desperation that never failed to raise her pulse and erode her resolve. Pristine fabric rustled to the floor, underscoring the profound stillness that pervaded the caravan. The moment she reached to begin unfastening her garters from the tops of her stockings, however, Esmé broke the silence with a whisper. 

“Let me _._ ”

Georgina looked up and saw that the woman on the bed had stretched one elegant hand toward her in a posture of a supplicant, eyes wide and darkly gleaming as she stared up in undisguised hunger. Her lips, somehow still stained with burgundy lipstick despite the afternoon’s activities, parted again.

“ _Please_.”

Suddenly weak-kneed and inordinately grateful for her proximity to the bed, Georgina sank down onto the mattress as Esmé rose butterfly-like from her cocoon of pillows to kneel behind her. Grasping her shoulders as if the optometrist might try to escape, she planted a series of meticulous kisses down her spine, stopping when she encountered a three-hooked clasp. Georgina’s brow furrowed in momentary confusion as she attempted to identify an entirely alien sensation, but as her satiny brassiere suddenly parted company from her body without any assistance from Esmé’s hands, she let out a sudden yelp of comprehension.     

“Is _that_ what you were doing with that mannequin back at the penthouse?”

With a shifty expression and a pause that lasted a few beats too long, Esmé replied. “Possibly.” 

Georgina wasn’t sure whether to roll her eyes or burst out laughing at the image of Esmé Squalor, the City’s sixth-most important and first-most villainous financial advisor, doggedly teaching herself how to remove lingerie with her teeth, but Esmé looked so sincerely abashed that she chose a more humane third option and tilted her head back to kiss her. “Well, I’m just glad to see you’ve taken an interest in empirical research,” she couldn’t help but add in mock-serious tones as she pulled away, a smile still playing at her lips. “You know, my name still has some credibility in scientific circles, and I’m sure we could publish your findings in a journ–“ 

Having reached the end of her rope (a phrase which here means “lost patience with Georgina’s mockery, as well as with her remaining articles of clothing”), Esmé chose that moment to demonstrate a further application of her new technique. Sliding onto the floor, she insinuated herself between the optometrist’s thighs, arranging herself on her knees and watching in satisfaction as amusement fell away, replaced with something ravenous. With calculated confidence, Esmé trailed her hands up the sides of Georgina’s left calf, tracing the prominent back seam of her hosiery and smiling to herself as she felt the legs to either side of her part further in anticipation when she teased the tender spot at the back of her knee.

Halting when she reached the tops of the stockings, Esmé bowed her head, wrapping her lips around the frontmost suspender clip. As her tongue disengaged the button from its metal loop, she looked up to fix Georgina with a triumphant expression while her nimble fingers made quick work of the other two fasteners and rolled the offending garment down to reveal the milky skin beneath. Having repeated the process with equal facility on the other leg – _results must always be replicable_ , thought Georgina disjointedly, _and oh god, her **tongue** …_ – Esmé finished her demonstration with a flick of her wrist that sent the garter belt itself, along with a pair of silky French knickers, slithering to the ground like St. Patrick’s vanquished snakes.   

Esmé pounced. Sweeping Georgina’s legs onto the bed and stretching her lean body pantherlike over her, she pressed one knee against the apex of her lover’s thighs, feeling her heat and relishing the shamelessness with which she ground her hips into the contact.   

“I believe that’s what you _scientists_ ,” she murmured, “call a proof of concept.”


	17. Chapter 17

Georgina had associated with more than her fair share of arsonists in her life, she reflected, but only Esmé Squalor seemed capable of setting a fire in her without so much as a metaphorical match, let alone a metaphorical torch, metaphorical Molotov cocktail, or metaphorical purpose-built incendiary laser. The fact that the youngest-ever financier to make the City’s top-ten list – _three years after bullshitting her way into a corner office straight out of business school_ , Georgina reminded herself – would prove disarmingly adept at unraveling every last thread of her self-control did not, strictly speaking, come as a surprise.

It would be incredibly obnoxious, she thought, back arching unbidden off the bed as Esmé’s skillful lips closed around her left nipple, if it weren’t so arousing.

Before Esmé, she had always fastidiously avoided younger women. While she told herself that they simply lacked the sort of life experience that might render them sufficiently interesting to hold her attention beyond the bedroom, she admitted (often – no, _exclusively_ in the throes of a single-malt bender) that the idea of finding herself in bed with someone taut and smooth and rosy terrified her not because of what she saw in them, but because of what she feared they would see when they looked at her.

So, naturally, she had ended up with Esmé. No frame tauter, no skin smoother, no cheeks rosier, and yet somehow Georgina never felt slack, rumpled, or sallow by comparison, and she suspected that this had something to do with Esmé’s inability to feign enthusiasm believably. In matters of her own personal taste, those few perennial constants amid a shifting sea of _in_ -ness, she displayed a pathological disinclination to compromise, a phrase which here means “categorically refused to admit into her life anything that did not live up to her rigid and exacting standards.” Georgina remained, ergo Georgina was precisely what she wanted.

And, _oh_ , how she wanted her.

Savoring the plushy firmness of Georgina’s breasts in her hands, Esmé shifted her attention to the right nipple, swirling and flicking her tongue until she felt the woman beneath her begin to squirm.

“Mm, you _like_ that, Georgie?”

In a desperate bid to maintain at least a veneer of control, Georgina replied in as close to irritation as she could muster. “You know damn well I do. I like it even better when you _don’t tease me_.”

“ _Really_?” asked Esmé, all honeyed tones and raised eyebrows as she traced a delicate path down Georgina’s abdomen with her index finger. “Because a _renowned_ optometrist has lectured me at length on many, many occasions about the importance of evidence to scientists and forensic investigators, and _this,_ ” she remarked, slicking her finger through molten heat before ghosting it ever-so-lightly over the achingly pebbled bud, “feels like evidence to the contrary.”

And with that, looking Georgina dead in the eye as if daring her into a refutation, she popped her now-dripping finger into her mouth. Extricating it with a smirk and a quirk of her eyebrows, she thrilled inwardly at the strangled moan her actions had elicited.

“Do you have even the _faintest_ idea,” she asked, her voice like embers, “how unspeakably _hot_ it is, making you fall apart like this? Knowing _I_ do this to you?”

As it happened, Georgina did, but before she could respond in the affirmative, Esmé evidently decided that mercy was _in_. Raking her coal-fire gaze slowly and deliberately from dusky eyes to full breasts to soft stomach, she splayed her hands over Georgina’s hips, each finger seeming to sear its imprint into the skin beneath. “ _Let me_ ,” she murmured for the second time that afternoon, but this time it was Georgina who added “ _please_.”

Esmé obliged. Kissing her way through the neat, silky thatch above, she let out an involuntary moan when her lips met moisture, first a trace and then a torrent as she reached the mouth of Georgina’s arousal. She never failed to marvel at how perfectly distinct her lover tasted, like musk and clean water with the barest suggestion of sweat (Olaf, she reflected, tended to taste more like an adamant declaration of sweat with the barest suggestion of cleanliness, which was somehow equally inviting), and she set about lapping and laving until her tongue was coated in her essence and she could neither taste nor smell anything else.

Registering the increasing volume and urgency of Georgina’s moans and muttered obscenities, Esmé acknowledged that spending twenty minutes going down on a woman without delving inside or suckling her clit could possibly be construed as teasing and chose to relent. Strengthening her grip on the optometrist's hips and coaxing her legs up to rest over her shoulders, Esmé plunged her tongue into the tight channel just as her outstretched thumb reached the over-sensitized bundle of nerves.

Georgina bit back a scream.  


	18. Chapter 18

_La petite mort_ , a French phrase literally translated as “the little death,” entered the English vernacular in the late 16th century; at that time, it referred to a fainting spell or nervous spasm, which should come as no surprise to anyone who is familiar with the state of clinical pathology in Renaissance-era Europe. In a document dating from 1882, however, linguists have located the first recorded instance of the use of the term as we know it today, namely to describe the deathlike sensation of orgasm without resorting to Germanic vulgarity.

The term had always been a particular favorite of Georgina’s. She enjoyed the way its delicate plosive consonants ghosted over her lips when spoken aloud, and she reveled in the guttural purr of the _r_ as it resonated in her throat, but most of all she appreciated the implication: that a moment of sensual bliss could crack open the door to transcendence. After Olaf, of course, she had forsworn that sort of maudlin romanticism – a phrase which here means “chosen to suppress the urge to view sex as anything beyond a means of securing physical gratification and, on one memorable occasion, a blind eye during a surprise Optometric Board inspection at a lumber mill.”

Every time Esmé Squalor’s sinful tongue and wicked fingers sent her spiraling into an incandescent void of pleasure, however, she came closer to reconsidering that position.

Georgina wondered if she somehow knew this. _That_ , she thought hazily as Esmé stretched out full-length against her, pressing her back against the optometrist’s chest and nestling her head into the remaining space on the pillow she hadn’t intended to share, _might explain her obsession with providing multiple orgasms_. Registering the self-satisfied grin on her face, however, an alternative explanation presented itself.

“Show-off.” The jibe might have sounded more convincing, Georgina reflected, had she not still been catching her breath.

Esmé’s voice was muffled by the pillow. “Mm, you say that as if it’s something _dreadful_ , and yet I didn’t hear you complaining. In fact, I may never hear anything ever again.” Georgina detected the pout in her voice. “If you insist on screaming like that, you know, I might be forced to demand that you change your specialty from eyes to ears, just so you can design me a pair of _in_ hearing aids once you've deafened me.”

“Oh, now you’re making _demands_ , are you? I’m not sure I like it when you get cocky like th–”

“Speaking of cocky,” interjected Olaf, attracting two startled glances, “it’s customary for the third member of a threesome to actually _get some attention_ , otherwise it’s not a threesome, it’s a floor show with a very tiny audience.”

“A terribly _rude_ audience,” Esmé corrected, casting a languid glance over his unflagging erection, "who nevertheless seems to be enjoying himself."

Georgina chimed in. “And if you didn’t want a floor show, you shouldn’t have asked for a demonstration.”

“I _didn’t_ ask for a –“

“Oh, but you _did_ , darling. ‘Does _Georgina_ ,’” mimicked Esmé in a taunting facsimile of Olaf’s voice, reaching her right hand behind her head to run her fingers through auburn hair, “’make you feel like this, you filthy little _bitch_?’” Comprehension dawned on his face and he opened his mouth to speak, but she continued over him. “Well _,_ I may be filthy, and I think we  _all_ know I’m a bitch, but do you know what?”

Deciding that he almost definitely did not know what, he shook his head.

“At least I’ve managed to get someone off this afternoon, which is more than _you_ can say for yourself.”

Had Olaf been wearing a belt, he might have accused Esmé of hitting him below it. Instead, he had the good grace to look, if not contrite, then at least flustered. “Georgina hasn’t either,” he pointed out, as though this somehow absolved him.

Lacing her fingers with the hypnotist's and drawing their twined hands toward the junction of her thighs, Esmé arched her back, draping her left leg over Georgina’s to allow her unfettered access.   

“Oh, but she’s about to.”  


	19. Chapter 19

On their first evening at Caligari Carnival, Madame Lulu had insisted upon reading Esmé and Olaf’s palms, assuring them that chiromancy – a word which here means “attempting to ascertain personal information about someone by examining their hands rather than their style of dress, their manner of communication, or their bank account statements,” – could quickly and accurately reveal critical truths about them that would enable her to better meet their needs. The process had been neither quick nor, in Esmé’s estimation, particularly accurate; as far as she could tell, it served primarily as an excuse for Lulu to caress Olaf’s hands, building him up with the kind of clumsy flattery that only an egotist of his magnitude could find endearing. Esmé’s reading had come as an afterthought, a belated attempt at professional propriety, and had ended abruptly when she laughed in the fortune-teller’s face at the suggestion that she possessed a talent for philanthropy.

As she brushed her thumb over Georgina’s, however, something in the memory of that night compelled her to pause, drawing the doctor’s hand not downward toward the wet ache between her thighs, but up to the level of her eyes. _Maybe_ , she thought as she studied it with an expression of both intense curiosity and curious intensity, _it’s worth a try_.

Disentangling Georgina’s fingers from hers to cradle them in her palm instead, she was struck by the compactness of the optometrist’s hand. She certainly wouldn’t make the cut as a ring model – _and I should know_ , thought Esmé, _god, was **that** ever a waste of talent_ – but there was a sort of ruthless elegance there: no unnecessary length to the fingers, no soft adipose tissue beyond the bare minimum dictated by physiology, no disproportionate elements disrupting the ratio of digits to palm. The word _efficient_ flashed through her mind and conjured up images from the first time she had watched Georgina at work, the nimble precision in her manipulations of minuscule springs and diminutive screws acutely and startlingly erotic.

The enigma, she realized suddenly, eyes snapping back into focus, lay in the fingernails. Clipped short and sculpted in the name of professional hygiene, their shape strengthened the overall impression of utmost practicality, but their color belied it. In fact, Esmé reflected, eyes narrow with concentration as she flipped through her mental image bank and failed to locate any evidence to the contrary, she had never seen Georgina without nail polish – tonight burgundy, but typically dark, generally jewel-toned, and never, ever chipped. Those fastidiously unsentimental hands, decorated almost in spite of themselves in rich, vibrant color, tugged at the corner of Esmé’s mind where half-remembered words collected dust before consigning themselves, as a wise man once said, to the mansions of rest.  

 _Synecdoche_ , she thought. _From the Greek. A part that stands for the whole_.

“Esmé?” Georgina’s voice, equal parts desire and confusion, broke through her thoughts like a skipped stone over still water. “What’s going on in there?” She punctuated the question with the barest brush of her lips over Esmé’s temple.

“Nothing,” she replied in an absent murmur. Relinquishing Georgina’s hand, she appeared to come back to herself, writhing backward against her in a gesture of pure need. “Please, Georgie, just _touch_ me.”


	20. Chapter 20

“Begging already, are we?” asked Georgina, with a pointed glance over the back of Esmé’s head toward Olaf. “Well, you know I can’t say no to you when you ask so very,” and here she inhaled sharply as the other woman rocked her hips, “ _very_ nicely.” Her hand began to meander over Esmé’s body and she noted with vested interest – a phrase which here means “a great deal of curiosity and growing arousal, despite the satiated flush still coloring her chest” – the exchange rate between her touches and her lover’s responses. A lingering skim of her palm down a toned oblique amounted to a sigh. The graze of a thumb over one dusky nipple seemed to equate to an arch of the back, with a whimper left over in change. An agonizingly light sweep of the fingertips up the inside of the thigh, however, yielded by far the most enjoyable results.

Esmé spoke in a voice that put Georgina in mind of a cello strung too tightly. “The next time I hear a _word_ of complaint about how I tease you,” she ground out through clenched teeth, “I am going to laugh. In. Your. Face.” She inhaled shakily. “And when I’ve finished laughing, I’m going to tie you to the four-poster in the northwest corner bedroom and I am going to bring you to the edge over and over and _over_ until you’re sobbing and screaming and ruining my sheets, and then - and  _then_ \- I might _consider_ letting you come, but only if you can manage to apologize to me with my tongue in your cunt.”

Had she been face-to-face with Esmé in that moment, Georgina would have seen the victorious gleam in her eyes as two flawlessly-manicured fingers plunged into her without warning.

“I – oh, _fuck_ , Georgie _–_ I knew it, _unh,_ knew it’s pointless to ask you for anything” – Esmé gasped as the fingers inside her began to curl deliciously – “ _nicely_. Nice gets me what _you_ want. _Filthy_ gets me what _I_ want.”

“Really?” Georgina replied, low and dirty in her ear. “And what is it you want, Esmé?”

This had always been one of Esmé Squalor’s favorite questions. “I want you to _fuck_ me. Not screw me. Not make love to me. _Fuck_ me.”

Evidently discerning the subtle linguistic nuances of her vulgarity, Georgina slipped a third finger in with the first two, crooking the middle digit forward and experiencing a warm surge of gratification at the way Esmé’s eyes rolled back as her internal muscles clenched. “So, what you’re saying,” she mused, “is that you want me on your level. Is that right?”

Esmé clearly intended her keening groan as an affirmation, but Georgina chose to clarify further.

“You want me to _ravish_ you, is that it? Make you feel like a twisted little deviant tramp, fucking you in front of _him_? You want it fast and rough and sordid and obscene and –”  

“ _Harder_ , Georgie, _fuck_ , _harder_ , ohh, my _god_ , and I want you on top of me, want you holding me down...”

Without hesitation, and without pausing the movement of her hand, Georgina shifted to allow her to roll from her side to her back on the cushions, prudently stifling the impulse to mutter “pillow princess” – a phrase which here means “a woman who prefers to let others take the lead” – in the process. 

Kneeling between pale, slender legs, she dipped her head with remarkable grace to flick at a hardened nipple with her tongue, her own breasts pressing firmly against the taut plane of Esmé’s stomach as she used her upper body to pin her to the bed.  

From his position against the wall, close enough to reach out and touch the women sharing the bed with him, but wisely refraining, Olaf groaned. Esmé focused her eyes for a moment on the man in front of her, her pupils widening further as she took in his heaving chest, his bruised ribs, and his weeping cock, and she looked up, directly into Georgina’s eyes. When she spoke, her voice was preternaturally steady.   

“And I want you to finish both of us.” 

It was a testament to Esmé’s sheer audacity that she would make the request, and a testament to her effect on Georgina that the hypnotist failed to reject it out of hand.

“ _That_ ,” she said, stilling her fingers, “was _not_ part of the plan, Esmé.”

“Oh, come _on_.” The frustration in her voice grew more pronounced as she discovered exactly how securely the other woman’s torso held her hips in place. “ _Please_ , Georgie, just once, god, I’ll do _anything_ , I don’t _care_ anymore, just let me see you touch him.”

Georgina Orwell had made an art form of exploitation, not to mention a second career and something of a hobby. She could sense an attempt at manipulation almost before it began, and have the prospective manipulator in the palm of her hand – a phrase which here means “either under her control or begging for death, and often both” – in a matter of seconds. Not a shadow of a doubt clouded her mind that Esmé had settled on _those_ words and _that_ tone because she knew precisely which of her buttons they would push, and how hard.

 _Is it really exploitation_ , she wondered to herself, _if I want her to push them_?

Slowly, without breaking eye contact, she resumed the movement of her left hand inside Esmé, reaching out toward Olaf with her right and blindly wrapping her fingers around his thick and aching length.  

A duet of unholy sounds reverberated through the caravan as she found a rhythm, suddenly and absurdly appreciative of her younger self for mastering the playground technique of rubbing one’s stomach while patting one’s head. For her present situation, of course, a playground would have proven a horrifically inappropriate venue, but it seemed that, unlike dodgeball, long division, or good citizenship, this skill had finally transferred productively into adult life.

Meanwhile, Count Olaf found himself in a curious position. Having begun to suspect that Esmé had arranged the entire afternoon as an elaborate ruse to assassinate him by means of prolonged deprivation of blood flow to his head, he supposed that, in terms of a coup de grâce, a hand job from the most dangerous woman he knew probably fell somewhere between fitting and poetic. _On the other hand_ , he thought with desperate optimism, the pun failing to register through the white noise building in his ears, _there’s always the off-chance Georgina’s feeling merciful_.

Georgina was not feeling merciful. Every stroke of his familiar flesh dredged up memories of his duplicity, his incompetence, and, most inexcusable of all, her own weakness in falling not only for his bullshit but for _him_ , and not only once, but twice. Tightening her grip and incorporating the twist of the wrist that she had learned early on to avoid if she wanted him to last the night, her mind pulsed with a single, burning thought: _We’ll see who’s weak now_.


	21. Chapter 21

It was over in a matter of seconds. With an incoherent roar to rival the lions’ outside, Olaf was coming, his pleasure-starved body contorting in paroxysms that tested the mechanisms of the Murphy bed to their limit. Had she chosen to give him the satisfaction of looking in his direction, Georgina might have laughed outright at the look of dazed indignation on his face as he slumped back, spent, against the wall; however, deciding he had received more than enough of her attention already, she spared him the further indignity.

Instead, her focus returned to the woman underneath her. “So,” she asked almost casually, reaching up with her recently-freed hand to brush a stray forelock away from the glassy black eyes staring into hers, “was _that_ what you had in mind?”

Esmé caught the slightly-too-solicitous note in her voice, but the heady combination of the scene she had just witnessed and the sensation of Georgina’s expert fingers inside her had stifled her caution. “ _God_ , yes, Georgie, _fuck_ , that was hot, could’ve watched you for _hours_ …”

“Really?” Something unnerving slithered in under the curious tone. “How interesting. Tell me, how did you manage to _watch_ when you were looking me dead in the eye the entire time?”    

“What are you talking ab–”

“You’re too smart to play dumb with me, Esmé. You think I don’t know a power play when I see one? That wasn’t about watching me get him off. That was about seeing if I’d get him off _because you said so_.”

Esmé blanched visibly, a schoolgirl caught in a lie. _I played her. She caught me. There are only two ways this can end_ , she thought, and for the first time that day something akin to trepidation twisted in her chest. _Either she leaves, or I pay._

After a pause that she clearly dragged out on purpose, Georgina continued, her face a study in neutrality. “Well, did you like it?”

Recalling one of Jerome’s favorite sayings – _no, no, this is **not** the time to think think about Jerome _– Esmé decided that, having found herself at the bottom of a pit of her own making, the wisest course of action was to stop digging, and she replied with unaccustomed frankness. “Yes. Immensely.” Constricting her inner walls around Georgina’s fingers, she added, “ _Obviously._ ”

“Good. Because it’s my turn now.” The optometrist’s voice had taken on an imperious edge. “Get on your knees and face him.”

 _So I’m going to pay_ , Esmé realized. _Well, that answers **that** question. _  Balancing carefully on the lumpy mattress, she felt rather than saw her lover kneel down behind her before she was pulled backwards, coming to rest on Georgina’s lap as her left arm snaked across her chest, locking her in place like the figurehead of a particularly scandalous seagoing vessel.   

“Spread your legs. Knees on either side of mine.” Her voice felt like molten steel in Esmé’s ear. “I want him to see _exactly_ what I do to you.”

She complied without hesitation. Georgina slid the middle three digits of her right hand back into the slick heat between her thighs, stroking in and out at an achingly perfect angle but deliberately setting far too slow a pace for a woman who had already come perilously close the edge twice in one afternoon.    

Trying and failing to coax her into increasing her speed with a buck of her hips, Esmé let out a huff of frustration. “Georgina, what the _f_ –”

“Exactly. This is me. _Fucking_ you.” Georgina quirked her middle finger against the spot inside Esmé that sent velvet shockwaves through her body. “My way, for once. _Not_ yours.”

“I don’t _care_ whose way you’re fucking me! I’ve been waiting _hours_ , Georgie, I can’t take it much longer, just _let me come_ , make me – _mmmmm.”_

Employing the same carefully-orchestrated precision she used in tightening delicate hinges and shaping glass lenses, the optometrist began to knead her thumb against Esmé’s overstimulated flesh in counterpoint to her curling fingers, feeling the telltale sluice of moisture down her hand. “Oh,” she murmured with a wicked chuckle, “I think we both know that won’t be a problem.”  

As the movements quickened and deepened, Esmé wondered briefly whether the intense pleasure rising up in her stemmed from arousal or relief. _It doesn’t matter_ , she told herself. _All that matters is that she doesn’t stop_. Concluding that this sentiment merited mentioning aloud, but finding herself unable to vocalize anything more complicated than a moan, she decided instead to convey it through alternative means, a phrase which here means “by craning her neck to fix Georgina with the most beseeching expression she could muster.”

Her tacit plea ignited something in the hypnotist’s eyes, and when Georgina spoke, her voice carried the smoky reverence of incense, drifting in wisps and tendrils to fill every corner and crevice of the younger woman’s consciousness. “You’re exquisite like this, Esmé. _Exquisite_. And do you know what else you are?”

The field of her vision had begun to narrow, and Esmé registered dimly that Olaf appeared transfixed, his eyes more black than blue as he stared at her like a man in a trance. Her mind awash with blissful static, extraneous sensory input lost its relevance, leaving only the heavenly cacophony of sensations between her legs and one blazing, crystalline syllable as Georgina answered her own question.

“ _Mine_." 

Esmé shattered in her arms.


	22. Epilogue

As the late afternoon sun sank swiftly toward another red-dust Hinterland sunset, its final rays filtered into the caravan to cast an orange glow over a scene of unusual domesticity.

“You are most certainly _not_ driving back home!” Esmé, blouse rumpled and hair slightly disheveled, extricated the blindfold from the pile of turban silks on the floor and handed it to Georgina, who somehow looked precisely as crisp and pristine as she had when arrived. “Look, it’s practically dark already, and you’re _constantly_ telling me how the roads are absolutely _beastly_ at night out here in the…what would you call these? Sticks? Backwoods? Boondocks?”

 _Never in my life_ , thought Georgina, stifling a laugh, _did I think I would hear Esmé Squalor use the word “boondocks.”_ Folding the black fabric into her bag, she zipped its compartment shut with an air of finality. “First of all, in the Hinterlands, it’s ‘backcountry,’” she began, “and I’m not sleeping under the Big Top out there, so what would you suggest instead?”

“Well,” replied Esmé with studied nonchalance, glancing down at her fingernails, “I suppose you _could_ stay in the caravan _I’ve_ been using. Just so you don’t have to drive through the...backcountry...at night.”

“Are you _sure_ that’s what this is about?” asked Georgina. “Or are you just trying to ask me to stay the night?”

Olaf paused midway through buttoning his shirt. “The caravan we’ve been _sharing_ ,” he interjected, scowling at Georgina but clearly addressing Esmé, “is built for two people. One,” he pointed at his chest, then in the general direction of his girlfriend, “two." 

Georgina had just opened her mouth to congratulate him on his impressive newfound ability to count to two when Esmé cut her off. “But this caravan was built for _one_ , and look how comfortable we’ve been in here!”

“Comfortable. Right,” grumbled Olaf, rubbing at his abraded wrists. “There’s only one bed over there, Essie, and I’ve had enough sharing for one day.”

“Then you can take the floor, _darling_. I’m sure the rug is perfectly comfortable.” She exchanged a glance with Georgina, who stood holding the door ajar with one hand, the other wrapped around the handle of her cane. “Unless, of course, you’d prefer to stay here. I’m sure Madame Lulu would be _thrilled_ to find you waiting for her." 

“Might even let you share the bed,” Georgina deadpanned, pushing the door open fully.

Esmé snorted. “Oh, she’d _definitely_ let him share the bed.”

“You know what? She would! And do you know why?” burst out Olaf. “Because Lulu knows how to forgive and forget, let bygones be bygones, _let water flow under the bridge_ …”

Halfway out the door, Georgina paused and made to turn around, her grip on her cane tightening. 

“Let it go, Georgie.” By means of encouragement – a phrase which here means “in an effort to get her out the door, but also as an excuse for physical contact” – Esmé reached out to deliver a none-too-gentle smack to her backside. An ellipsis of a pause hung in the air as the optometrist turned to glare at her, but after a moment the corners of her eyes crinkled and both women erupted in a fit of giggles. Rolling her eyes in mock annoyance, Esmé shifted her hand upward to press lightly against the small of Georgina’s back. _“Out_.”

For a moment, they were framed in the doorway, charcoal silhouettes against a fiery sky. Then Esmé slipped her hand into Georgina’s and pulled her down the steps, into the evening, and out of sight.  

Their laughter seemed to echo long after the door had closed behind them.


End file.
